German domain registry warns against .de billing scam

'A senseless and dubious service'

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German domain registry DENIC eG has issued a warning about "an attempt to extract money from customers for a senseless and dubious service." This, the second such scam to come to DENIC's notice this year, takes the form of a letter apparently designed to convince people they have to cough up DM270 in order to keep their .de domain for another year.

The letter comes from "Zentrale zur Registrierung Deutscher Web-Domains," ZRW, which sounds pretty official, but isn't. ZRW says that if your web address isn't registered, then you can register it for a year for DM269, but as DENIC points out, this doesn't actually have anything to do with the registration of the domain. "If you do not pay your DE-domain is neither in danger, nor will anything change with respect to its connectivity," says DENIC.

DENIC doesn't wax quite as lyrical this time around as last. Back in April it denounced the "so-called Deutsche Domain Verwaltung (German Domain Registry)" for demanding DM369 for "switching your web address online." This, it said, was "an attempt to extract money from customers for a useless and dubious service with a large amount of criminal energy." So there. ®